New York City
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The City of New York
The City of New York, most often called New York City, is the largest city in the United States, with a metropolitan area that is among the largest urban areas in the world. The city serves as one of the world's primary global cities, exerting a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, and entertainment. The city is also an important center for international affairs, hosting the United Nations headquarters.
The city consists of five distinct boroughs: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. It is the most densely populated major city in the United States, with an estimated 8,274,527 people[1] within an area of 304.8 square miles (789.43 km2).[2][3][4][5][6] The New York metropolitan area is also the largest metropolitan area in the country, with an estimated 19,750,000 people over 6,720 square miles (17,400 km2) in three states.[7]
New York is largely unique among American cities for its high use of mass transit, and the overall density and diversity of its population. In 2005, nearly 170 languages were spoken in the city and 36% of its population was born outside the United States.[8][9] The city is sometimes referred to as "The City That Never Sleeps" due to its extensive 24-hour subway system and constant bustling of traffic and people, while other nicknames include Gotham and the Big Apple.[10][11]
Founded as a commercial trading post by the Dutch in 1624, it served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790,[12] and has been the nation's largest city since 1790. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Wall Street, in Lower Manhattan, has been a dominant global financial center since World War II and is home to the New York Stock Exchange. Today, the city has many renowned landmarks and neighborhoods that are world famous. The city has been home to several of the tallest buildings in the world, including the Empire State Building and the twin towers of the former World Trade Center.
New York is the birthplace of many cultural movements, including the Harlem Renaissance in literature and visual art, abstract expressionism (also known as the New York School) in painting, and hip hop,[13]punk,[14]salsa, disco and Tin Pan Alley in music. It is also the home of Broadway theater.
Contents
History
The region was inhabited by about 5,000 Lenape Native Americans at the time of its European discovery in 1524[15] by Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian explorer in the service of the French crown, who called it "Nouvelle Angoulême" (New Angoulême).[16] European settlement began with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement, later called "Nieuw Amsterdam" (New Amsterdam), on the southern tip of Manhattan in 1614. Dutch colonial Director-General Peter Minuit purchased the island of Manhattan from the Lenape in 1626 for a value of 60 guilders (about $1000 in 2006);[17] a legend, now disproved, says that Manhattan was purchased for $24 worth of glass beads.[18][19] In 1664, the English conquered the city and renamed it "New York" after the English Duke of York and Albany.[20] At the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War the Dutch gained control of Run (a much more valuable asset at the time) in exchange for the English controlling New Amsterdam (New York) in North America. By 1700, the Lenape population was diminished to 200.[21]
New York City grew in importance as a trading port while under British rule. The city hosted the seminal John Peter Zenger trial in 1735, helping to establish the freedom of the press in North America. In 1754, Columbia University was founded under charter by George II of Great Britain as King's College in Lower Manhattan.[22] The Stamp Act Congress met in New York in October of 1765.
The city emerged as the theater for a series of major battles known as the New York Campaign during the American Revolutionary War. After the Battle of Fort Washington in upper Manhattan in 1776 the city became the British military and political base of operations in North America until military occupation ended in 1783. The assembly of the Congress of the Confederation made New York City the national capital shortly thereafter; the Constitution of the United States was ratified and in 1789 the first President of the United States, George Washington, was inaugurated there; the first United States Congress assembled for the first time in 1789, and the United States Bill of Rights drafted; all at Federal Hall on Wall Street.[23] By 1790, New York City had surpassed Philadelphia as the largest city in the United States.
In the 19th century, the city was transformed by immigration and development. A visionary development proposal, the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, expanded the city street grid to encompass all of Manhattan, and the 1819 opening of the Erie Canal connected the Atlantic port to the vast agricultural markets of the North American interior.[24] Local politics fell under the domination of Tammany Hall, a political machine supported by Irish immigrants.[25] Public-minded members of the old merchant aristocracy lobbied for the establishment of Central Park, which became the first landscaped park in an American city in 1857. A significant free-black population also existed in Manhattan, as well as in Brooklyn. Slaves had been held in New York through 1827, but during the 1830s New York became a center of interracial abolitionist activism in the North.
Anger at military conscription during the American Civil War (1861–1865) led to the Draft Riots of 1863, one of the worst incidents of civil unrest in American history.[26] In 1898, the modern City of New York was formed with the consolidation of Brooklyn (until then an independent city), the County of New York (which then included parts of the Bronx), the County of Richmond, and the western portion of the County of Queens.[27] The opening of the New York City Subway in 1904 helped bind the new city together. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the city became a world center for industry, commerce, and communication. However, this development did not come without a price. In 1904, the steamship General Slocum caught fire in the East River, killing 1,021 people on board. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the city's worst industrial disaster, took the lives of 146 garment workers and spurred the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and major improvements in factory safety standards.[28]
In the 1920s, New York City was a major destination for African Americans during the Great Migration from the American South. By 1916, New York City was home to the largest urban African diaspora in North America. The Harlem Renaissance flourished during the era of Prohibition, coincident with a larger economic boom that saw the skyline develop with the construction of competing skyscrapers. New York City became the most populous urbanized area in the world in early 1920s, overtaking London, and surpassed the 10 million mark in early 1930s becoming the first megacity in human history.[29] The difficult years of the Great Depression saw the election of reformer Fiorello LaGuardia as mayor and the fall of Tammany Hall after eighty years of political dominance.[30]
Returning World War II veterans and immigrants from Europe created a postwar economic boom and the development of huge housing tracts in eastern Queens. New York emerged from the war unscathed and the leading city of the world, with Wall Street leading America's ascendance as the world's dominant economic power, the United Nations headquarters (completed in 1950) emphasizing New York's political influence, and the rise of abstract expressionism in the city precipitating New York's displacement of Paris as the center of the art world.[31] In the 1960s, New York suffered from economic problems, rising crime rates and racial tension, which reached a peak in the 1970s.
In the 1980s, resurgence in the financial industry improved the city's fiscal health. By the 1990s, racial tensions had calmed, crime rates dropped dramatically, and waves of new immigrants arrived from Asia and Latin America. Important new sectors, such as Silicon Alley, emerged in the city's economy and New York's population reached an all-time high in the 2000 census.
The city was one of the sites of the September 11, 2001 attacks, when nearly 3,000 people died in the destruction of the World Trade Center.[32] The Freedom Tower, along with a memorial and three other office towers, will be built on the site and is scheduled for completion in 2013.[33]
Geography
New York City is located in the Northeastern United States, in southeastern New York State, approximately halfway between Washington, D.C. and Boston.[34] The location at the mouth of the Hudson River, which feeds into a naturally sheltered harbor and then into the Atlantic Ocean, has helped the city grow in significance as a trading city. Much of New York is built on the three islands of Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island, making land scarce and encouraging a high population density.
The Hudson River flows through the Hudson Valley into New York Bay. Between New York City and Troy, New York, the river is an estuary.[35] The Hudson separates the city from New Jersey. The East River, actually a tidal strait, flows from Long Island Sound and separates the Bronx and Manhattan from Long Island. The Harlem River, another tidal strait between the East and Hudson Rivers, separates Manhattan from the Bronx.
The city's land has been altered considerably by human intervention, with substantial land reclamation along the waterfronts since Dutch colonial times. Reclamation is most notable in Lower Manhattan, with developments such as Battery Park City in the 1970s and 1980s.[36] Some of the natural variations in topography have been evened out, particularly in Manhattan.[37]
The city's land area is estimated at 304.8 square miles (789.43 km2).[2][3] New York City's total area is 468.9 square miles (1,214.4 km2). 164.1 square miles (425.02 km2) of this is water and 304.8 square miles (789 km2) is land. The highest point in the city is Todt Hill on Staten Island, which at 409.8 feet (124.9 m) above sea level is the highest point on the Eastern Seaboard south of Maine.[38] The summit of the ridge is largely covered in woodlands as part of the Staten Island Greenbelt.[39]
Climate
New York City has a humid subtropical climate according to the Köppen climate classification, because the coldest month's (January's) average temperature is 29°F (–1.5°C) at John F. Kennedy International Airport and 32°F (0°C) in Central Park. The city enjoys an average of 234 sunny days a year.
Summers are typically hot and humid with average high temperatures of 79–84°F (26–29°C) and lows of 63–69°F (17–21°C). Winters are cold, but the city's coastal position keeps temperatures slightly milder than inland regions, with high temperatures of just above freezing and lows of just below freezing.[40] Spring and autumn are erratic, and can range from cool to hot, although they are usually pleasantly mild with low humidity.[40] Temperature extremes do occur, with temperatures rising above 90°F (32°C) on an average of 20–25 days each year, and dropping down to 10°F (–12°C) during a few days each winter.
The annual precipitation, which is spread fairly evenly throughout the year, is around 46 inches (117 cm).[41] The average winter snowfall is around 25 inches (63.5 cm), but this often varies considerably from year to year. Thunderstorms, which occasionally reach severe limits, are common during the summer months.
Though not usually associated with hurricanes, New York City is susceptible to them, notably the 1821 Norfolk and Long Island hurricane, which flooded southern Manhattan, and the New England Hurricane of 1938, which brushed the eastern end of the city. The city's long-term climate patterns have been affected by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a 70-year-long warming and cooling cycle in the Atlantic that influences the frequency and severity of coastal storms in the region.[42] Although direct strikes from hurricanes are very rare in New York, the city has been identified as one of the three cities in the United States most vulnerable to hurricanes, mainly due to its many narrow river channels, tall skyscrapers, large population, and low-lying infrastructure and coastal subway system, the other two cities being New Orleans and Miami.[43]
Environment
Mass transit use in New York City is the highest in United States and gasoline consumption in the city is at the rate the national average was in the 1920s.[45] New York City's high rate of transit use saved 1.8 billion gallons of oil in 2006; New York saves half of all the oil saved by transit nationwide.[46] The city's population density, low automobile use and high transit utility make it among the most energy efficient cities in the United States.[47] New York City's greenhouse gas emissions are 7.1 metric tons per person compared with the national average of 24.5.[48] New Yorkers are collectively responsible for one percent of the nation's total greenhouse gas emissions[48] though comprising 2.7% of the nation's population. The average New Yorker consumes less than half the electricity used by a resident of San Francisco and nearly one-quarter the electricity consumed by a resident of Dallas.[49]
In recent years the city has focused on reducing its environmental impact. Large amounts of concentrated pollution in New York City led to high incidence of asthma and other respiratory conditions among the city's residents.[50] The city government is required to purchase only the most energy-efficient equipment for use in city offices and public housing.[51] New York has the largest clean air diesel-hybrid and compressed natural gas bus fleet in the country, and some of the first hybrid taxis.[52] The city government was a petitioner in the landmark Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency Supreme Court case forcing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants. The city is also a leader in the construction of energy-efficient green office buildings, including the Hearst Tower among others.[53]
New York City is supplied with drinking water by the protected Catskill Mountains watershed.[54] As a result of the watershed's integrity and undisturbed natural water filtration process, New York is one of only four major cities in the United States with drinking water pure enough not to require purification by water treatment plants.[55]
Cityscape
Architecture
The building form most closely associated with New York City is the skyscraper, that saw New York buildings shift from the low-scale European tradition to the vertical rise of business districts. As of August 2008, New York City has 5,538 highrise buildings,[56] with 50 completed skyscrapers taller than 656 feet (200 m). This is more than any other city in United States, and second in the world behind Hong Kong.[57] Surrounded mostly by water, the city's residential density and high real estate values in commercial districts saw the city amass the largest collection of individual, free-standing office and residential towers in the world.[58][not in citation given]
New York has architecturally significant buildings in a wide range of styles. These include the Woolworth Building (1913), an early gothic revival skyscraper built with massively scaled gothic detailing able to be read from street level several hundred feet below. The 1916 Zoning Resolution required setback in new buildings, and restricted towers to a percentage of the lot size, to allow sunlight to reach the streets below.[59] The Art Deco design of the Chrysler Building (1930), with its tapered top and steel spire, reflected the zoning requirements. The building is considered by many historians and architects to be New York's finest building, with its distinctive ornamentation such as replicas at the corners of the 61st floor of the 1928 Chrysler eagle hood ornaments and V-shaped lighting inserts capped by a steel spire at the tower's crown.[60] A highly influential example of the international style in the United States is the Seagram Building (1957), distinctive for its facade using visible bronze-toned I-beams to evoke the building's structure. The Condé Nast Building (2000) is an important example of green design in American skyscrapers.[53]
The character of New York's large residential districts is often defined by the elegant brownstone rowhouses, townhouses, and shabby tenements that were built during a period of rapid expansion from 1870 to 1930.[61] Stone and brick became the city's building materials of choice after the construction of wood-frame houses was limited in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1835.[62] Unlike Paris, which for centuries was built from its own limestone bedrock, New York has always drawn its building stone from a far-flung network of quarries and its stone buildings have a variety of textures and hues.[63] A distinctive feature of many of the city's buildings is the presence of wooden roof-mounted water towers[64]Garden apartments became popular during the 1920s in outlying areas, including Jackson Heights in Queens, which became more accessible with expansion of the subway.[65]. In the 1800s, the city required their installation on buildings higher than six stories to prevent the need for excessively high water pressures at lower elevations, which could burst municipal water pipes.
Parks
New York City has over 28,000 acres (11,000 ha) of municipal parkland and 14 miles (22 km) of public beaches.[67] This parkland is augmented by thousands of acres of Gateway National Recreation Area, part of the National Park system, that lie within city boundaries. The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, the only wildlife refuge in the National Park System, alone is over 9,000 acres (3,600 ha) of marsh islands and water taking up most of Jamaica Bay. Manhattan's Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, is the most visited city park in the United States with 30 million visitors each year — 10 million more than Lincoln Park in Chicago, which is 2nd.[66]Prospect Park in Brooklyn, also designed by Olmsted and Vaux, has a 90 acre (36 hectare) meadow.[68]Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, the city's third largest, was the setting for the 1939 World's Fair and 1964 World's Fair.
Boroughs
New York City is composed of five boroughs, an unusual form of government.[69] Each borough is coextensive with a respective county of New York State as shown below. Throughout the boroughs there are hundreds of distinct neighborhoods, many with a definable history and character to call their own. If the boroughs were each independent cities, four of the boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx) would be among the ten most populous cities in the United States.
Culture and contemporary life
"Culture just seems to be in the air, like part of the weather", the writer Tom Wolfe has said of New York City.[76] Numerous major American cultural movements began in the city, such as the Harlem Renaissance, which established the African-American literary canon in the United States. The city was a center of jazz in the 1940s, abstract expressionism in the 1950s and the birthplace of hip hop in the 1970s. The city's punk and hardcore scenes were influential in the 1970s and 1980s, and the city has long had a flourishing scene for Jewish American literature. Prominent indie rock bands coming out of New York in recent years include The Strokes, Interpol, The Bravery, Scissor Sisters, and They Might Be Giants.
Entertainment and performing arts
The city is also important in the American film industry. Manhatta (1920), an early avant-garde film, was filmed in the city.[77] Today, New York City is the second largest center for the film industry in the United States. The city has more than 2,000 arts and cultural organizations and more than 500 art galleries of all sizes.[78] The city government funds the arts with a larger annual budget than the National Endowment for the Arts.[78] Wealthy industrialists in the 19th century built a network of major cultural institutions, such as the famed Carnegie Hall and Metropolitan Museum of Art, that would become internationally established. The advent of electric lighting led to elaborate theatre productions, and in the 1880s New York City theaters on Broadway and along 42nd Street began showcasing a new stage form that came to be known as the Broadway musical.
Strongly influenced by the city's immigrants, productions such as those of Harrigan and Hart, George M. Cohan and others used song in narratives that often reflected themes of hope and ambition. Today these productions are a mainstay of the New York theatre scene. The city's 39 largest theatres (with more than 500 seats) are collectively known as "Broadway," after the major thoroughfare that crosses the Times Square theatre district.[79] This area is sometimes referred to as The Main Stem, The Great White Way or The Realto.
The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which includes Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet, the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, the Juilliard School and Alice Tully Hall, is the largest performing arts center in the United States. Central Park SummerStage presents performances of free plays and music in Central Park and 1,200 free concerts, dance, and theater events across all five boroughs in the summer months.[80]
New York City is considered by many to be the heart of stand-up comedy in the United States.[81][82]
Cuisine
New York's food culture, influenced by the city's immigrants and large number of dining patrons, is diverse. Jewish and Italian immigrants have made the city famous for bagels, cheesecake, and New York-style pizza. Some 4,000 mobile food vendors licensed by the city, many immigrant-owned, have made Middle Eastern foods such as falafels and kebabs standbys of contemporary New York street food, although hot dogs and pretzels are still the main street fare.[83] The city is also home to many of the finest haute cuisine restaurants in the United States.[84]
Media
New York is a global center for the television, advertising, music, newspaper and book publishing industries and is also the largest media market in North America (followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, and Toronto).[86] Some of the city's media conglomerates include Time Warner, the News Corporation, the Hearst Corporation, and Viacom. Seven of the world's top eight global advertising agency networks are headquartered in New York.[87] Three of the "Big Four" record labels are also based in the city, as well as in Los Angeles. One-third of all American independent films are produced in New York.[88] More than 200 newspapers and 350 consumer magazines have an office in the city[88] and the book-publishing industry employs about 25,000 people.[89]
Two of the three national daily newspapers in the United States are New York papers: The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Major tabloid newspapers in the city include The New York Daily News and The New York Post, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton. The city also has a major ethnic press, with 270 newspapers and magazines published in more than 40 languages.[90]El Diario La Prensa is New York's largest Spanish-language daily and the oldest in the nation.[91]The New York Amsterdam News, published in Harlem, is a prominent African American newspaper. The Village Voice is the largest alternative newspaper.
The television industry developed in New York and is a significant employer in the city's economy. The four major American broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC, are all headquartered in New York. Many cable channels are based in the city as well, including MTV, Fox News, HBO and Comedy Central. In 2005, there were more than 100 television shows taped in New York City.[92]
New York is also a major center for non-commercial media. The oldest public-access television channel in the United States is the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, founded in 1971.[93]WNET is the city's major public television station and a primary provider of national PBS programming. WNYC, a public radio station owned by the city until 1997, has the largest public radio audience in the United States.[94] The City of New York operates a public broadcast service, nyctv, that produces several original Emmy Award-winning shows covering music and culture in city neighborhoods, as well as city government.
Accent
The New York City area has a distinctive regional speech pattern called the New York dialect, alternatively known as Brooklynese or New Yorkese. It is often considered to be one of the most recognizable accents within American English.[95] The classic version of this dialect is centered on middle and working class people of European American descent, and the influx of non-European immigrants in recent decades has led to changes in this distinctive dialect.[96]
The traditional New York area accent is non-rhotic, so that the sound [ɹ] does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant; hence the pronunciation of the city as "New Yawk."[96] There is no [ɹ] in words like park [pÉ”Ëk] (with vowel raised due to the low-back chain shift), butter [bʌɾə], or here [hiÉ™]. In another feature called the low back chain shift, the [É”] vowel sound of words like talk, law, cross, and coffee and the often homophonous [É”r] in core and more are tensed and usually raised more than in General American.
In the most old-fashioned and extreme versions of the New York dialect, the vowel sounds of words like "girl" and of words like "oil" both become a diphthong